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Article: He accepted-and contested-the universe.(BOOKS)(William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism)(Book review)
- Article from:
- CrossCurrents - The Journal of Addiction and Mental Health
- Article date:
- September 22, 2007
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2007 Association for Religion and Intellectual Life. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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Robert D. Richardson
William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism
Houghton Mifflin, 2006. xvi + 622pp. $30 (cloth)
First of all, forget that "maelstrom." This is not some sort of cultural panorama of fin de siecle America, with William James as Corybant or coryphaeus of a band of wild-eyed "modernists." (James died in 1910, the same year as Mark Twain, long before voices like Ezra Pound or Gertrude Stein or Hart Crane began to be heard.) Richardson, who has done solid biographies of Emerson and Thoreau, offers us a splendid full-length portrait of a thinker who in many ways was not a modernist (his lifelong attachment to religion, his ...